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16 Responses to “ LitWit Challenge: Snap Novels ”

1. # 1 walaakongkwenta Says:
   November 1st, 2009 at 20:34

   If there is one novel or series that inspires and influences me to be a better teacher and a woman, it is Anne of Green Gables.

   The whole series of Anne of Green Gables centers on Anne, an imaginative, red-haired orphane turned teacher turned mother. It focuses on Anne’s challenges in life and her optimistic wit to overcome them.

   This novel isn’t the regular tear-jerking piece of literature that usually highlights the moving actions, works, and advices of teachers. Nor it portrays the heroism or martyrdom of women. Anne of Green Gables showcases the value of being a teacher and a woman through all the subtle realities of everyday experiences. It doesn’t deliberately tell the lessons from challenges; to conveys its morals, it uses its very powerful tool, Anne herself.

   In Anne can women of the globe see themselves as a child, as a school girl, as a friend, as a lover, a teacher, an artist, a woman.

   “God in heaven, all is well in the world.”

2. # 2 Ces Rodriguez Says:
   November 2nd, 2009 at 08:46

   Possession by A.S. Byatt. Because it begins, apropos to this challenge, in a library. Because it has recall: turned into a movie that sank without a trace but starred the always luminous (but now goopy) Gwynyth. Because it is a literary big tent – lots of things happening all at once: 10 clowns in a Volks, 20 Chinese gymnasts forming an inverted pyramid while spinning plates at the end of a stick, etc. Because it will appeal to people who like sudoku and Where’s Waldo. Because it makes you forget you’re queued at the bank on your Monday lunch hour after a long holiday. Because it is a love story. Because it is melodrama. Because it is gothic. Because it is fiction but at the end of the wild ride, I believed it myself.

3. # 3 Paghilom Says:
   November 2nd, 2009 at 14:01

   J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

   It (like Tolkien’s LOTR and Bola(ny)o’s 2666, these should better be read as one) is about a man’s story of honesty and judgment. I love that it’s simple and everyone must read it because if I hadn’t, I would’ve gone back to law school (I quit because I’ve too much respect for it), unknowingly cheated my way to passing the bar, gone so proud about it I’d start reciting poetry and would’ve been so full of myself I’d get the guts to teach international law pretending I know, say, where Geneva is and dismiss as inferior everyone else who doesn’t, lied about it more before I realized it’s too late and would go hit my wife, steal your tax money, claim everything I see as “grand” even if they’re not, and would’ve not graded my reading an A.

   And because it’s a fun read, too.

4. # 4 quintab Says:
   November 2nd, 2009 at 14:48

   Richard Russo’s Empire Falls. The story emphasizes the oft-neglected bitchy wisdom that being so incredibly nice can bring out the wuss out of a person. The main character, Miles, has lived a life seemingly not comensurate with his natural abilities and discovers this so lately after his life has gone bleak.

5. # 5 Evan Says:
   November 2nd, 2009 at 22:59

   I love “At Swim, Two Boys” by Jamie O’Neill.

   When I first picked up the book, what discouraged me from reading it was the very Irish-ness of the book: the tone, the language, and the perpetual gloom of the atmosphere. But eventually, it drew me in its beautiful tale of two young men struggling to find freedom not only for themselves but also for their country. O’Neill managed to weave issues of self-identity and national consciousness in one epic love story.

   While some might see it as a perverse excuse for promiscuity and point out its many moral flaws, I think that those who’d keep an open mind will see that the real message of the novel is to magnificently reveal that the struggle for freedom and acceptance is common in all of us.

   It really twists your heart in more ways than one.

6. # 6 brewhuh23 Says:
   November 3rd, 2009 at 03:53

   I don’t want to chose a favorite book but if I were hold up at gunpoint, it would be Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer. I was 15 when my dad shoved it in my face when I complained there are no good books to read at home. I devoured it like a lion to a carcass. I get sidetracked with the big words but no worries, nothing a good and handy thesaurus won’t solve.

   I enjoyed reading the book a lot because it talked about 2 men who had different fates, but eventually their lives were interwoven from the series of events that came about. Think Montague and Capulet, or take it closer to home, Marcos and Aquino. Archer told the stories of these 2 men, so gripping, that at 15, I wondered how life can be at Europe. I was mystified how power and money can take control of one’s life and destiny and I was challenged to discover more about life outside the confines of my comfort zone (I was sooo idealistic and naive at 15).

   If you are into power-grabbing, money-hungry characters in an amalgam of circumstances, Kane and Abel is the book for you. I haven’t seen that book in years so I better find it and devour on it again.

7. # 7 sufjanstevens Says:
   November 3rd, 2009 at 16:28

   I would recommend anything from Jorge Luis Borges.

   Brodie’s Report is a great introduction to the author’s uncanny body of works, written when he was almost at the sunset of his life, seventy years but never void of magisterial power. Borges can turn simple anecdotes into a fascinating account of history. He is a brilliant wordsmith–the register of words kicks right into the heartlessness (or perhaps the absurdity) of the stories, and the way his personal life blurs the fictive nature of his anecdotes is enough to leave you in a state of awe, if not honest appreciation. My favorite piece is “The Gospel According To Mark,” a stunning recreation of a biblical story, but distinctly human and compelling.

   I also love The Aleph and Other Stories. This collection is comprised of seventeen shorts from The Aleph, first published in 1949, twenty-three musings on history and future from The Maker, and a pair of perplexing thoughts from Museum. I am a slow reader; I finished it in around five days. The peculiar heaviness confuses me which world I am in right then, because there are too many. The register of words, again, is supernatural; it’s surprising, the thought how an arrangement of letters and words can easily move one’s frame of mind.

   Further readings on Borges will lead you to Ficciones and The Book of Imaginary Beings, which are both wonderful and fascinating.

8. # 8 triviabuff Says:
   November 3rd, 2009 at 19:30

   It took Susanna Clarke ten years to finish Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and it shows: in the detail, the historical references, the well-crafted footnotes. But that’s not why it’s one of my favorite novels in recent years. I loved it because of her writing, and how, from the first page, I was sucked into an alternate 19th-century England, where magic was as much a part of life as wars with Bonaparte and vile weather and crotchety old men. The novel centers on the uneasy relationship between the persnickety Mr. Norrell and the charming young Jonathan Strange and their clashing views on magic, but it covers so much more. Madness, reason, other worlds, a mysterious magician called the Raven King…
   as someone who loved the Chronicles of Narnia and the Prydain Chronicles, LOTR, the Wrinkle in Time and Earthsea trilogies, the tales of Fion mac Cumhaill, Austen and Georgette Heyer, it felt as though the book had been written just for me.

   It is a hefty book – my copy runs to a little over a thousand pages – but I finished it in a week. Needless to say, I didn’t get much sleep (or much work done) then.

9. # 9 angus25 Says:
   November 4th, 2009 at 01:50

   The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

   I remember I just read this one three months after buying it, which was two years ago, and I should have started right after paying for it. Although there aren’t many original books nowadays, I find a sense of novelty in it.

   It is about a father and his son, living in an ashen world filled with burnt corpses and carcasses, and they are journeying for the sea coast. It is a story of survival that is too much for me to handle. Most of the things in that world are dead, and while reading their story, you only get gray visions of the environment, the characters’ faces, and their lives.

   You hope for the characters to make it until the end of the journey despite the slim chances that they have. They have no food, no water, and all they have are the other survivors of the worldwide tragedy who are either out there to kill them or to eat them, and each other.

   I think I have to say something about the son. At many times, that boy brought me to tears. He is indeed someone you might call an angel, and I will never find out where he is able to gather such a nature given the scenarios in their post-apocalyptic world. I admit that he might never be real in this world, but I still hold on to the idea of this boy walking around somewhere or in another plane of existence.

   The conversations that they have, which were devoid of quotation marks that made me feel like I could hear them right inside my head, are so compelling. All the love and the care that they have for each other must be enough to motivate them through all that pointless walking and hiding, but still they go on, hoping against all the odds.

   Upon finishing the book, which was I think around 4 AM, I was never able to get my sleep. I could hear the clock ticking away with my heartbeat. I was stunned and shaken. When I think about their story, I am not able to give my best description. There is so much in only about 200 pages. It is not a long story, but it still haunts me up to now.

   It should be read by others before the movie comes out. I don’t know when it will come out, but anyway, the novel is about enduring when you think you have no reasons to go on, about the savage side of human nature and how worse it could get, and about the tremendous strength of the spirit.

   It must be entitled that way because of all the walking. After all, it is only through walking that one can discover and rediscover the patterns in life and make something out of it.

10. # 10 Momelia Says:
    November 4th, 2009 at 16:39

    The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
    (Douglas Adams, 1979)

    The Earth gets demolished to make way for a hyperspatial bypass. A highway of sorts, if you must. An Earthman, Arthur Dent, survives with the help of a long time friend, Ford Prefect, who turns out to be an alien with a very helpful knack for hitching rides in spaceships.

    1. It’s divided into very brief chapters for easy reading. There’s something new to imagine every five to ten pages or so to keep you from getting bored.

    2. The author, Doug Adams, employs this clever wordplay that brings the inter-galactic hitchhiking to life and tries to make you grin in the process. There’s the Infinite Improbability Drive (which makes the fantastic starship Heart of Gold run), the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster (the alcoholic drink of choice), and the Galactic Institute’s Prize for Extreme Cleverness (verbatim).

    3. You will love Marvin the Paranoid Android. He’s this charming little robot with the brain the size of a planet, and he’s always depressed. I like him so much, I got me some quotes:

    “Do you want me to sit in the corner and rust, or just fall apart where I’m standing?”

    “Would you like me to go and stick my head in a bucket of water?”

    “Why stop now just when I’m hating it?”

    “Life, loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it.”

    4. If you should happen to travel the galaxy and back, then bring a towel. I know it doesn’t make sense, but it perfectly complements the next item.

    5. This book provides The Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. And that answer is 42. Yes, as in the six times seven kind of forty two. Unhinged, isn’t it? But it gets better.

    6. They created a supercomputer, the Earth, in order to come up with the Ultimate Question to The Ultimate Answer. It was demolished to make way for a hyperspatial bypass five minutes before The Ultimate Question was revealed.

    6. See, the author’s crazy. Nope, not the institutionalized kind of crazy (that’s de Maupassant, love him), but he’s the laugh out loud kind of crazy that gets people invited to parties. His book’s a riot in consequence. And it’s divided into very brief chapters for easy reading.

    7. It’s got a movie adaptation. Which meant it had a profitable readership. Which meant it was good enough to buy. Still is, but in between the movie ticket and a paperback copy, I’d go with the book. On account of the movie sucked a nut.

    8. The book had the proper sense to keep away from nuts, and so it didn’t suck one.

11. # 11 kaboboyan Says:
    November 4th, 2009 at 23:16

    Edith Wharton’s “Age of Innocence” must be one of the best arguments for the beauty of reading. It gives you the depth that a two-hour-long movie cannot give; not even the best visual artist like Scorsese, who made Wharton’s book into a respectable movie, could ‘bring you a character’s feelings, make them meet yours and mix with yours’, as one reading advocate put it. The experience is more affecting with vivid, meaningful and precise prose, like Wharton’s.

    The book is a love triangle set in 1870s New York. Newland Archer is a wealthy lawyer who is about to marry May Welland who comes from the respectable Mingott clan. Enter Countess Olenska, May’s cousin, who just fled her husband in Europe. Newland’s world is shaken up when he falls for the unconventional Countess, a kindred spirit who shares his contempt for the hypocrisy and shallowness of upper-class New York.

    It could have been just another melodrama about a man caught between two different women, about choosing between societal obligation and personal fulfillment. But Wharton wrote it so skillfully, luring the reader into Newland’s world which is actually not at all familiar to us now living in a place that’s freer, less prudish. Wharton paints so lucidly the trappings that Newland wants to reject – from the ornate ballrooms and theatres, the blur of jewels and ballgowns, to the gardenias in men’s lapels. You can’t help but be transported to that era and be similarly gagged by its rigidity and propriety. But what captivates you further are the unspoken, the imagined conversations and contemplations, that define the characters and their actions. All those nuances, which are most delicious when read slowly, the movies cannot capture as acutely, even when suggested by a Joanne Woodward or Day-Lewis voice-over.

12. # 12 rossan Says:
    November 5th, 2009 at 16:36

    If I will recommend a book to someone, it would probably be “The Little Prince” by Antoine Saint de Exupery. It is short, so a person who does not like to read will not be discouraged because of its length. It has pictures (I found out from my classmates that they are more interested if the book has pictures) and most importantly, I think everybody could relate to it. One way or another we have met grown ups like that, and the Little Prince’s adventure will touch and inspire anybody to be better than what they are. Plus, it will introduce new time readers to the pleasure of reading.

    One more book I will probably recommend to a friend is “All the Sad Young Literary Men” by Keith Gessen. It’s the story of three male just out from college wondering what they will do with their lives. The book portrays what most young adults face; confusion, not knowing who you are and what you’ll be and the sadness all of us feel. What I do like about this novel is its message, that despite all the pain, the suffering, the broken dreams, despite the bleakness o0f living, we still have to live and continue living because there is hope and the uncertainty that maybe, we can have what we have always dreamed of.

    here’s a link to a review of “All the Sad Young Literary Men”: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21316

13. # 13 caterpillar-girl Says:
    November 7th, 2009 at 15:38

    I will recommend Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney. It’s relatively short and the use of the second person point of view will help hold a non-reader’s attention span. It’s about, essentially, a self-absorbed ass. Set in the fun, tragically hip era that was the 80s, Bright Lights Big City follows a yuppie who is “a cross between a young F.Scott Fitz-Hemingway and the later Wittgenstein” and his adventures in the glitzy, glamorous world of New York. Readers can relate to the need for escape and the journey towards some sort of redemption. Smart, engaging, funny, Bright Lights, Big City is I think a good place to begin building your arsenal of books.

14. # 14 piscesboy Says:
    November 7th, 2009 at 21:26

    The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
    It is a story of Larry Darrel, who, traumatized by experiences in
    World War I, decides to research for some transcendent meaning in his life. I think it is well-written, and a lot can be learn from this novel. The novel shows that rejection of conventional life and search for meaningful experience is acceptable, and it shows in the novel that one can be successful in pursuing this path. This novel also illustrates that the more materialistic characters didn’t quite achieve what they desire.
    I think this novel is very apt and timely in the present time. In the time of materialism, consumerism and conventionality is forced upon people, they will realized while reading this novel that they are other alternative paths to living, and success is not solely measured on material wealth. I think when people realized this, I think some aspects that are detrimental to the well-being of humans, as well as of the animals, plants, and earth in general, will be lessen.

15. # 15 Crappediem! Says:
    November 7th, 2009 at 23:58

    Mockingbird by Walter Tevis

    Mockingbird is a powerful novel of a future dying world of no children, no art, no reading. Where people would rather burn themselves alive than endure, but some still refuse to surrender. Those that survive spend their days in a narcotic bliss or choose a quick suicide rather than slow extinction. Humanity’s salvation rests on the last human who can read, the last robot who can think, and the last independent woman.
    I love this novel novel because it depicts so intelligently the process of reading and of learning to read.

16. # 16 princeofelba Says:
    November 8th, 2009 at 00:11

    (I corrected something.)
    I know more good books, maybe better than this, but I believe Wambaugh’s “Glitter Dome” is going to be a treat for a first-time reader. It is at once familiar—one can say it is a bit police drama; at the center of the story, without revealing very much, are two cops and their chase of this case. Yes you guessed it, it is an excursion into the criminal underbelly, here, of LA, and the cops are, yes, buddies; but this is a buddy cop pulp fic set to bluesy jazz. It is a literary buddy cop story, but nothing of the overdoing that sinks these literary, for lack of a better word, “gentrifications” of subjects. Well maybe it wasn’t set out like that that in the first place. The prose touches Ginsberg in its stalk and I believe E.E.Cummings’ irreverence for (language) the rules of the English language.
    Language is as much a star as the characters. Everyone talks as people should talk in that milieu. The nicknaming and the beautiful effect of the occurence of proper nouns in where they usually don’t.The narration, the choice of words, makes you feel how it is to wander into that milieu. But this “authenticity” is not abused and sensationalized so that it is no longer authentic, I believe you get what I mean, like say how a Hollywood blaxploitation movie does to its supposed “subject.” what it does is, and this is the best ilustration i can come up with at the moment, is sequence out the DNA strain of this bandwidth and the printout is this novel. I mentioned this is a cop yarn set to bluesy jazz, well, the ending is tragic and the shocking events before it didn’t prepare for it. the author has more good stuff but this is a nice place to start. one teeming modern novel. a beautiful contempo practice of the novel. It is an epic poem of a novel.